Instacart Product Sense: Design a New Offering for Its Business Users

You are a product manager at Instacart. Design a product or feature for the businesses that take part in Instacart's marketplace, and explain how it would make their experience on the platform better. Walk through which businesses you would build for, the problems they face today, what you would build first, and how you would know it is working. ```hint Follow the order through the marketplace Instacart connects several sides at once. Whatever business group you choose, trace how its problems surface for customers and shoppers too, and favor a problem whose fix improves more than one side. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Which businesses do you mean: the retailers whose stores fill orders, the consumer brands that sell and advertise through the catalog, or companies that order through Instacart for their own operations? - Is the goal to grow revenue from businesses, to retain and expand retail partners, or to improve their experience regardless of short-term revenue? - Should I focus on a particular size of business, such as national chains with their own technology teams or small independent stores? - Can the solution change the shopper's picking workflow, or should it stay within tools the businesses use? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear choice among Instacart's business-facing groups, with the reason it beats the others for the stated goal - Concrete, ranked pain points for the chosen businesses, grounded in how an order moves from catalog to shopper to customer - A specific solution with a scoped first version, prioritized against alternatives by impact and effort - How the solution improves the business's experience, and its effect on customers and shoppers - Success metrics with guardrails, plus risks such as operational burden and business concerns about data ### Follow-up Questions - A large national chain wants the same capability delivered through its own systems. How does that change your roadmap? - How would you make sure the businesses keep using your solution after launch, when they have little time to spare? - If the data showed the solution helped businesses but slowed shoppers down, what would you do?